The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard

8 February, 2013 | By Lee Marshall

Dir: Simon Klose. Sweden. 2012. 85mins

The Internet dates more quickly than almost any other contemporary cultural signifier. This is what gave The Social Network much of its leverage: the fact that it was a period film about things that had happened six or seven years previously. Swedish director Simon Klose’s absorbing, stirringly indignant but also rather melancholic documentary about the industry-speared decline and fall of the world’s biggest file sharing website has a similar effect. Torrents? File-sharing? The Pirate Bay? It all feels like ancient history. Which perhaps proves the film’s main point: that in the end, a system with an unlimited appetite and budget for litigation won out against the cyber-libertarians.

TPB AFK, as it is also billed, will find a sympathetic audience in Berlin, where it opened the Panorama Dokumente section of this year’s Berlinale. Urban web-literati and Internet activists of a certain age are the film’s main target, rather than the kids of today – most of them streamers, Spotifyers or (gasp) legal downloaders – who will file this one alongside the Tutankhamen documentaries. This said, TPB AFK has a satisfying enough dramatic arc to sustain some theatrical action in selected city slots; and the director has also prepped a 52-minute version for TV markets. There’s no need to ask where else the film might be viewed. Just in case you were in any doubt what the director’s take on piracy is, the final caption reads: ‘Please share this film online’.

An opening caption fills in the background to the events charted in the film, reminding us that “in the early years of the 21st century”, Swedish-based operation The Pirate Bay became the world’s biggest file-sharing website, and that back in faraway 2008, “Hollywood and the media industry” filed a lawsuit against the men behind the site. The film focuses on the three co-founders of the site, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde, rather than the fourth defendant, businessman and TPB investor Carl Lundstrom. It’s a smart move, as it’s the affectionate but increasingly strained rapport between the three friends that will give the film much of its dramatic heft.

The tensions are there already in a pre-trial press conference held in February 2009, when only tech specialist Fredrik and Peter – the group’s articulate, politically-motivated main spokesman – turn up. Shooting on light, handheld digital cameras, the cinematographer-director gets impressive access to lawyers, defendants and witnesses, scoring a few points off Monique Wadstead, billed as “Hollywood’s lawyer”, who seems all too painfully aware that she is inevitably going to be cast as the screen villain. Later, she briefly passes the role on to mild-mannered presiding judge Norstrom, who is revealed to be involved with not one but two copyright law associations.

But this is not a one-sided view: the director captures a certain reluctance among the three defendants to fess up to what profits, if any, they have made from a site that at its peak, via a computer stack less than a metre high, was channelling more than half of the world’s bit torrent traffic. Though the political ramifications of the Pirate Bay case are charted (in Sweden, the cyber libertarian Pirate Party returned two EMPs in the 2009 European Parliament elections), they’re never allowed to dominate. In the end, the film suggests, the Pirate Bay Three are not that different from so many who have made fortunes in various web startups around the world: talented, entrepreneurial and geeky, they just happen to be on the wrong side of the law.

What one imagines must have been reams of footage are deftly edited to highlight two main stories. One is the steamroller inevitability of the final verdict, which is presented as more of an industry diktat than a case of right and wrong. The other is the effect of the wearing three-year ordeal on three clever but not overly robust lads who have all the vision and the vim driven out of them by paperwork, hearings, subpoenas and summonses, and who are deserted by a media circus that no longer considers them newsworthy. With the aid of Ola Flottum’s edgy electronic mood music, TPB AFK invents moments of suspense centring on attempts to keep the pirate file-sharing ship afloat by finding new hosts, new secure sites, sympathetic hosts. But in the end this thriller stuff feels like window dressing; at heart, the film is a bittersweet comedy of frustration – with the accent on bitter.

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